Traditionally, the concept of community refers to a group of people bound together with close ties and personal relationships, based typically on a kinship and on reciprocity. More recently, the concept has extended to online environments; its members linked globally by information and communication technologies (ICT). In educational context, community practices take place in technology-enhanced learning environments, where learning processes and learning support are often blended in face-to-face and in online learning environments.
Published in Chapter:
Communities in Technology-Enhanced Environments for Learning
Johanna Pöysä (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) and Joost Lowyck (University of Leuven, Belgium)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-198-8.ch051
Abstract
The contemporary society addresses complex, interrelated, and interactive global situations to be faced by its citizens. Instead of pursuing solitary actions, this post-modern turn requires its actors to develop capacities to resituate their activities in collective unities and to successfully communicate their actions within these multiple local and global communities. Also in education, the concept of community continues to possess a positive image and the optimistic premises of how communication technologies may enable communities to grow have been widely discussed. For example, in higher education, educational practices (e.g. Virtual University) are more often fixed around Web-based collaborative learning environments, based on the broad frame of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) approach. It is put forward in this chapter that in higher education, technology-enhanced learning communities, if seen as an extension of the idea of Web-based collaborative learning environments, could be welcomed as timely and innovative educational practices - as relevant paths to successful collaborative learning.